Rusty Russell proposes Million Channel (Lightning) Project

Australian free software programmer and advocate, Rusty Russell, has called for a Lightning Network stress test.

In a Medium post he says that he is on the look out for collaborators. The project, he adds, would be in several parts:

1. Do some rough analysis of the current Lightning Network: number of (public) channels, number of nodes, distribution of channels by node, and distribution of channels in blocks.
2. Apply a scaling factor to make a similar network on regtest, preferably in a reproducible manner. This would be the corpus.
3. Write a program to generate all the gossip generated by that network.
4. Feed the gossip into a test node and watch it die horribly.
5. Fix the bottlenecks in each implementation.

“Obviously, there are an infinite number of refinements, but I expect we would get useful results out of even a simple version of this. It would be nice to get ahead of network growth and uncover issues before they become deployment problems,” Russell writes.

He signs off by noting that he has ordered a Raspberry Pi “as my third lightning node for more performance testing”.